Causes: Adult Education, Education, Literacy, Remedial Reading & Encouragement

Mission: Open books collects, grants, and sells used books, provides community programs and mobilizes passionate volunteers to raise awareness about literacy, improve reading and writing skills and spread the love of reading and writing in chicago and beyond.

Programs: During the 2016-17 academic year, open books served 3,565 unique students over the course of 17,319 hours of programming. We continued our work with 146 grade school students at 8 schools every week through reading buddies, helped over 3,150 4th-12th graders from 54 schools become confident, articulate writers at our creative writing workshops, created 244 published young authors through our readthenwrite program, granted 133,598 books to schools and nonprofit partners through book granting programs, and guided 25 aspiring teen writers in our summer publishing academy program. As always, we focused our passion on spreading the love of reading and writing, and our students, their teachers, and our volunteers joined in our enthusiasm.